The cellular market in 2003 was around 150-160 million devices in the US and the number is growing at over 10% per year at least. Europe already has 320 million cell phone users, and the global market is over 1.4 billion devices.
Cell phone carriers are looking for opportunities to increase both revenue and profits by providing new services. For example, recently cell phones have been provided with browsers to allow surfing the internet from the phone. One of the needs businesses, families and individuals have is the need to know where their employees, children and friends are. No two way position information sharing technology currently exists as far as the applicant is aware.
The one way location sharing prior art includes On Star and the Mercedes Benz TeleAid services where, via GPS receivers and cellular phone capability built into a car, an aid center can track cars all over the world and speak with the occupants and sense when the cars airbags have deployed. Other commercial services allow parents to track the locations of their children in a one way location sharing manner. None of these services allow the occupants of the car to know where the aid center is or allows the children to know where their parents are.
Another need is for a system for use by motorists, hikers, pilots and boatmen to allow them to be able to contact rescuers and know the location of the rescuers as they come to the aid of the stranded person and to allow the rescuers to know the location of the victims they are trying to rescue. The need requires that cell phones have the capability to be reconfigured in the field to add an “instant buddy” to the list of people with whom location information is shared. The prior art kid tracking systems could not be reconfigured in the field to add new individuals with whom location information was to be shared.
Differences Over Kid Tracking Prior Art
In the prior art, one could buy phones that were set up at the manufacturer to enable parents to locate their children. One such service allows up to eight phones to be used and allows parents to monitor the locations of their kids. But these services do not allow the kids see the locations of their parents because the service is not set up to share location information between phones. In other words, it is a one way service with the kid's locations being sent to the parents phones for display but not vice versa. Further, there is no mechanism to add groups and members of groups, and there is no mechanism to set up “instant buddies” as that term is used below (temporary location sharing between phones on an ask and accept basis which automatically expires after a configurable interval terminates). The kid locator phones are set up at the factory and nothing can be changed in the field by the users and they are always on and cannot be disabled.
It is useful to be able to share locations among multiple cell phones which have GPS locator ability. Such an ability would be useful for people in groups who have made plans to meet at specific locations at specific times. When one person is late, the others in the group would be able to ascertain the tardy person's location. To alleviate privacy concerns, it would be useful to be able to turn off location sharing or to program location sharing so that it turns itself on automatically at some date and time and turns itself off at some other programmable date and time. It would also be useful to have a map display on cell phones which are picture enabled and to plot the locations on the map of persons in a group who have their location sharing capability turned on.